Read a text description of this video
SCRIPT
- SOUNDBITE: Student footage, Iguala, Mexico, September 2014 (SPANISH): Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Why are you shooting? Why are you shooting?
- TEXT ON SCREEN: WARNING: This video contains distressing images of violence, including shooting. Viewer discretion is advised.
- SOUNDBITE: Student footage, Iguala, Mexico, September 2014 (SPANISH) / OFF audio of Metodia Carrillo Lino, August 2023: Nine years. Waiting for our children.
- SOUNDBITE: Student footage, Iguala, Mexico, September 2014 (SPANISH): Let’s go dude.
- SOUNDBITE: Student footage, Iguala, Mexico, September 2014 (SPANISH) / OFF audio of Metodia Carrillo Lino, August 2023: No answers at all...
- SOUNDBITE: Student footage, Iguala, Mexico, September 2014 (SPANISH): They are shooting at us, dude! You already killed someone, call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!
- SOUNDBITE: Metodia Carrillo Lino, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): As mothers, we will never give up looking for our kids. Because I love my son very much. I will never forget him. As long as I am healthy, I will always look for my son. Always. Every single day.
- PHOTOS: Sequence of photos of the Ayotzinapa students. Ambient sound, August 2023 (SPANISH): Because they took them alive! And want them alive!
- TEXT ON SCREEN: On September 26, 2014, Mexican police, working with members of a criminal cartel, attacked and forcibly disappeared 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College. The students have not been seen since.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: For years later.
- SOUNDBITE: Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico, press conference, Mexico City, Mexico, September 2018 (SPANISH): Now I can say, with full confidence, that I will fulfill all the promises I made during the campaign. And one of my commitments was to solve the unfortunate case of the disappearance of the young men from Ayotzinapa.
- SOUNDBITE: Epifanio Álvarez (Father of Jorge Álvarez Nava), press conference, Mexico City, Mexico, September 2018 (SPANISH): We are very hopeful that it will happen. Otherwise, as far as I am concerned, I prefer to die.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: President López Obrador did not keep his promise. Nearly five years into President López Obrador’s term, what happened to the 43 students remains unclear. Their whereabouts are still unknown.
- SOUNDBITE: Metodia Carrillo Lino, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): The president never gave us answers. We want the truth! We don’t want any more lies!”
- SOUNDBITE: María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): The information is there. The Army has it. But they said nothing. That’s why we’re very concerned. Because President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is the commander of the Armed Forces, has not backed us up. Because if he had backed us up, they would already have investigated the army.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: The army was closely monitoring the students on the night they were taken. But it has refused to give investigators access to key information, like photos, videos, and phone records from the night of the disappearance.
- SOUNDBITE: Clemente Rodríguez, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): There is still a lot to investigate, so that we finally get truth and justice, and find out where our children are.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: In July 2023, a group of international experts investigating what happened to the students stopped their work and left Mexico. They said they could not continue investigating because the army was hiding key evidence that could contain clues about what happened to the students.
- SOUNDBITE: Carlos Beristain (Member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts), press conference, Mexico City, Mexico, July 2023 (SPANISH): They continue to lie about the information held by the Armed Forces about what happened and about documents they hadregarding the possible whereabouts of the students.
- SOUNDBITE: Ángela Buitrago (Member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts), press conference, Mexico City, Mexico, July 2023 (SPANISH): The refusal to provide information and the obstinacy of the denials, even in witness statements before prosecutors, by senior army and navy officials… only serve to deny the obvious.
- SOUNDBITE: Carlos Beristain (Member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts), press conference, Mexico City, Mexico, July 2023 (SPANISH): The risk we have faced is that lies become an institutionalized response”
- TEXT ON SCREEN: The kidnapping and enforced disappearance of the 43 students shocked Mexico and the world. But it was not an isolated incident.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: Over 110,000 people are officially considered missing in Mexico. The true number is likely higher. Thousands continue to disappear every year. More than 36,000 have been reported missing since President López Obrador took office.
- SOUNDBITE: Clemente Rodríguez, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): There are murders, there are disappearances, and the army knows it, and the government knows it. To put an end to the impunity, he [López Obrador] needs to somehow find the whereabouts of the 43 and of the thousands of others who are missing.
- SOUNDBITE: María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH):People should know what is actually going on here in Mexico, that the army is key to finding our disappeared children and to this day they have not been investigated.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: President López Obrador should immediately call on the army to stop hiding information and ensure there is a serious investigation that leads to truth and justice.
- SOUNDBITE: Clemente Rodríguez, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): I would demand that he faces up to the commitments he made during his campaign, that he hasn’t kept. He should demand that the Army cooperate, because it has not contributed anything. He is protecting the military tooth and nail.”
- SOUNDBITE: Cristina Bautista (Mother of Benjamín Ascencio Bautista) , Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): We continue to fight, we continue to demand that the Mexican government finds our children alive, because that's how they took them, alive.
- AMBIENT SOUND: We want them alive!
- SOUNDBITE: Clemente Rodríguez, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): The army had links with Guerreros Unidos, that is, with organized crime, they all [worked] hand in hand. So, the Mexican State should be held accountable for this.
- SOUNDBITE: María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): They took them alive. We want them alive.
- TEXT ON SCREEN: President López Obrador, which side are you on? Will you help the military cover up what happened to the students from Ayotzinapa? Or will you support the families seeking truth and justice?
- SOUNDBITE: Group of students from Atyozinapa Rural College, Mexico City, Mexico, August 2023 (SPANISH): [Count up from 1 to 43. When they arrive to 43, they shout:] “Justice!”.
- END CREDITS: Producer/Editor – Andrés Brenner; Videographer – César Fuentes; Additional footage –Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.
On September 26, thousands of people will protest in cities across Mexico to demand justice for one of the country’s most infamous unresolved atrocities—the 2014 kidnapping and enforced disappearance of 43 student teachers in Iguala, Guerrero.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised when he was elected in 2018 to determine the truth about what happened to the students. Instead, he has allowed the investigation to stall, apparently to protect his allies in the military. His actions are not just a betrayal of his promise. They are a symbol of the president’s inability—or, more likely, unwillingness—to unravel the complex web of cartel violence, government and military corruption, and impunity that has plagued Mexico for decades.
Mexicans have grown sadly accustomed to violent atrocities. Tens of thousands of people are murdered every year. Over 100,000 are missing. Mass graves and clandestine cartel crematoria are regularly uncovered. When investigators attempt to unravel these crimes, it often becomes difficult to determine where drug cartels end and the government begins. The students’ disappearance was emblematic of this problem. Evidence now suggests that nearly every part of the government and military in the town of Iguala was working with—or for—the powerful drug cartel that apparently ordered the kidnapping.
The government’s initial response under then-president Enrique Peña Nieto, was sadly typical. Rather than expose a messy web of corruption that might have led to the highest levels of government, the authorities attempted an elaborate cover up. They altered evidence and tortured witnesses to pin the disappearances on a few bad apples.
When López Obrador took office, he promised an end to this corruption and impunity. “Arriving at the truth and doing justice won’t weaken our institutions, it will strengthen them,” he said. He announced a fresh investigation into the whereabouts of the 43 students. He created an official truth commission, asked the attorney general to appoint a respected human rights defender as the special prosecutor for the case, invited a group of independent experts from the Organization of American States (OAS) to support his work, and issued an executive order instructing the entire government to cooperate.
But when investigators started scrutinizing the military’s role in the disappearance, they faced backlash—and President López Obrador’s promised support vanished. The special prosecutor resigned in 2022 and left the country after authorities intervened to prevent him from prosecuting senior military officials. And in July, the group of independent experts stepped down saying it was impossible to continue investigating while the military hid key evidence, including more than 80 pages of intercepted phone conversations between cartel members and authorities that, according to the international experts, could contain clues about what happened to the students.
President López Obrador has not used his authority to force the military to hand over the missing documents. When asked why, he told journalists that the military is a “fundamental institution for the Mexican state” and, absurdly, accused the international investigators of being part of a “campaign” to undermine the armed forces.
Unfortunately, his unwillingness to challenge the military is part of a pattern. He also refused to step in when another group of investigators, from the official truth commission documenting abuses against leftist activists during the Cold War, said in August that the military and intelligence services had refused them access to key files. And he did nothing when, earlier this year, it was revealed that the Defense Ministry had most likely been illegally hacking the phones of people investigating military abuses, including a senior member of his own government and the lawyers representing the 43 students’ families.
President López Obrador, once critical of Mexico’s famously abusive and opaque military, has now placed that same military at the center of his government. The Army and Navy carry out hundreds of once-civilian government tasks. They build megaprojects, run tourist sites, implement welfare programs, collect billions in customs revenue, and even run the pharmaceutical regulatory agency. Generals accompany the president almost everywhere. And López Obrador has encouraged state governors to consult the military before naming key positions in their cabinets.
The advances made in untangling the Iguala case over the past nine years are the result of sustained international scrutiny that allowed independent investigators to uncover the truth, even when it was uncomfortable for those in power. Mexico’s friends and neighbors should not remain silent as the government allows the investigation into one of the most infamous atrocities in the region’s recent history to stall. Nor should they be indifferent to the continuing crisis of disappearances and growing military empowerment.
The Secretary General and member states of the OAS, which sent the international investigators to support Lopez Obrador’s initial commitment to justice, should urge the president to keep his word and press the military to cooperate.
In July, the families of the 43 missing students held a news conference, where they called on López Obrador to “make clear which side [the government] is on: the side of the Army’s lies or the side of the families and the truth.” The international community should also make clear where it stands.
